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Basic Natural Language Processing

Strongly Recommended Prerequisites

Recommended Prerequisites

Natural language processing (NLP) is a broad field; it includes everything from linguistics to machine translation. It's also an expression used in data science to hype a product's capabilities. Often, natural language processing just means that regular expressions are used. You don't have to understand a lot of NLP theory to start using NLP techniques.

Description

This is an effective introduction to analyzing text data. It's based on the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) Python library. You don't really have to be a Python programmer to use this book though, as introductions to basic Python concepts are dispersed throughout the book. By the end of the text, you'll be familiar with the basic techniques of natural language processing for classifying text and extracting the meaning of sentences, plus you'll be proficient with the NLTK if you do the exercises. You can impress your friends by downloading your social media conversations and analyzing them!

Description

This is a good introduction to general natural language processing. It covers a wide range of topics in NLP, but it has some deficiencies. It's a bit theory-heavy, and the algorithms are given in pseudocode. The field of NLP has advanced a lot since the second edition of this book came out, so parts of this book are well behind the state of the art. Fortunately, a new edition of this book is under development and you can view a draft of the new material at the link above.